SmallBusinessNewz

Google announced that Chrome is now supporting an experimental “autocomplete type” attribute for form fields that enable developers to unambiguously label text and select fields with common data types, like “full-name” or “street-address”.

“With this attribute, web developers can drive conversions on their sites by marking their forms for auto-completion without changing the user interface or the backend,” says Google software engineer Ilya Sherman.

In a proposal for the attribute, it says:

Autofill agents save users’ time, and help site authors convert users in purchase and registration flows. Autofill works best when site authors are able to directly provide hints to autofill agents as to what data belongs in each field.
…

We believe that website authors have strong incentive to facilitate autofill on their forms to help convert users in purchase and registration flows. Additionally, this assists users by streamlining their experience.

What type of social media site dominates a culture can say a lot about the people who use that site. Or the people. Or both. Without extrapolating any big conclusions from their data, Palo Alto Networks has taken a look at some of their data collected at the end of last year to see who is using which social media site and where.

Palo Alto has already shown us the that growth of people are using social media sites at work is rising astronomically, but what’s intriguing is that despite 54% of businesses saying they don’t allow access to social networking sites at work, the bandwidth at businesses used for web mail and social networking has increased 500% since 2010. Seems that businesses either have flexible definitions of what is considered work-related social networking, or they just don’t want to set the precedent outright that states, “Hey, you can work here but feel free to use Facebook all you want.”

Breaking down the social media traffic for countries around the world, Palo Alto found some telling statistics in their data. One that sticks out for perhaps it’s obviousness is that Asian markets such as Korea and China “have more usage of other social networking apps in the enterprise than Facebook.”

Another fun take-away from Palo Alto’s report: French people use social networking games and plug-ins 50% more heavily than the global average. I guess that preoccupation explains why theycouldn’t participate in Wikipedia’s SOPA protest earlier this month.

In 2009, Google announced the SPDY application-layer protocol. You know, “Speedy”.

As Google explained at the time, it’s for transporting content over the web, and is designed for minimizing latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression.”

Today, Google is talking about how it’s making the web even speedier and safer. In a post on the Chromium Blog, Google software engineers Will Chan and Roberto Peon write:

Chrome, Android Honeycomb devices, and Google’s servers have been speaking SPDY for some time, bringing important benefits to users. For example, thanks to SPDY, a significant percentage of Chrome users saw a decrease in search latency when we launched SSL-search. Given that Google search results are some of the most highly optimized pages on the internet, this was a surprising and welcome result.

We’ve also seen widespread community uptake and participation. Recently, Firefox has added SPDY support, which means that soon half of the browsers in use will support SPDY. On the server front, nginx has announced plans to implement SPDY, and we’re actively working on a full featuredmod-spdy for Apache. In addition, Strangeloop, Amazon, and Cotendo have all announced that they’ve been using SPDY.

Mozilla (which Google considers a partner, not a competitor, remember) is a contributor to SPDY, and Google says they’re all working hard at finalizing and implementing draft-3 of SPDY early this year.

Twitter has added four new languages to their Translation Center, and in a few months users should be able to participate in the conversation in some right-to-left reading languages.

The new languages are Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, and Urdu and users can head on over to theTranslation Center and start working today.

The Translation Center, launched in 2011, is a giant crowdsourcing program that allows users from dozens of languages to help translate Twitter (the product, not the actual tweets). Twitter says that over 425,000 people have helped with translations. Because of their work, Twitter is available in 22 languages – a number which is about to jump to 26.

Twitter had this to say in a blog post:

As we prepare to add Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu to Twitter, we’ve developed new ways to ensure that Tweets and hashtags will work properly in right-to-left languages. We’ve also made changes behind the scenes to give right-to-left language speakers a localized user experience. As soon as our volunteers have completed their translation work, we’ll make Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu available for everyone on Twitter.com later this spring.

Move over SOPA, tell ACTA the news? Or is this more of a case of “move over SOPA, it’s ACTA time?” Or does, “Stop! ACTA time!” work? For me, it’s “just when you thought it was safe to go back on the web, ACTA happens.” That’s right folks, while SOPA/PIPA were being placed in the ditch as smoldering husks, President Obama signed the ACTA “treaty,” which is, at its most elementary, a multinational agreement that addresses intellectual property enforcement.

There are many issues involved with President Obama’s signing of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement — which occurred in September 2011 — and whether or not it should be treated as an executive agreement or an actual treaty between the agreeing countries. With an executive agreement, the President does not require the approval of the Senate, whereas, with a treaty, Senate approval is required. That, however, is not the issue, especially when you consider the initial zeal with which the both houses of the U.S. Government supported SOPA and PIPA.

Until the protestation blackouts, that is.

As for ACTA, there hasn’t been a great deal of push back from the Senate concerning President Obama’s signature, although, perhaps there should be. As TechDirt points out:

The law is clear that the only things that can be covered by executive agreements are things that involve items that are solely under the President’s mandate. That is, you can’t sign an executive agreement that impacts the things Congress has control over. But here’s the thing: intellectual property, in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, is an issue given to Congress, not the President.

Does this mean President Obama overstepped his boundaries by signing ACTA? If you follow the letter of the law, as laid out by TechDirt, then yes, yes he did.

Perhaps that what explains one of the latest White House petitions, asking for ACTA to be submitted to the Senate for “Ratification as Required by the Constitution for Trade Agreements.” As you can see, the petition takes the position that ACTA is indeed a treaty and because of that, President Obama’s signature is not enough for the United States to be apart of. From the petition’s page:

The Administration has opposed SOPA and PIPA due to the damage these laws could do to the Internet. But many view the Anti-Counterfeiting Trace Agreement (ACTA) to be far worse.

This Administration supported the negotiation of ACTA in secret with a selected group of nations and with input from many corporate interests. The public and consumers were excluded from this process. FOIA requests were denied because of “National Security” concerns.

We object to the Administration’s negotiation of ACTA in secret, and approval of ACTA by Executive Agreement.

Considering the White House’s stance on both SOPA and PIPA, not to mention, Vice President Biden’s own words about regulating the Internet,

On January 4, Anonymous tweeted that an Indian hacker group had posted Symantec source code to Pastebin.

In response to this warning, Symantec has issued a security white paper (pdf) recommending that all users of pcAnyhwere disable the software until further notice.

“Upon investigation of the claims made by Anonymous regarding source code disclosure, Symantec believes that the disclosure was the result of a theft of source code that occurred in 2006. We believe that source code for the 2006-era versions of the following products was exposed: Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition; Norton Internet Security; Norton SystemWorks (Norton Utilities and Norton GoBack); and pcAnywhere.”

pcAnywhere is a Norton product that allows for direct PC to PC communication.If the ctolen source code is actually released, the damage to networks that use pcAnywhere could be considerable.

More detailed information from the white paper:

Our current analysis shows that all pcAnywhere 12.0, 12.1 and 12.5 customers are at increased risk, as well as customers with prior, unsupported versions of the product. pcAnywhere is also bundled in three Symantec products, Altiris Client Management Suite and Altiris IT Management Suite versions 7.0 or later, and Altiris Deployment Solution with Remote v7.1. In addition, customers with earlier versions of Altiris suites may have opted to leverage pcAnywhere. The increased risk is isolated to the pcAnywhere components only. There are no known impacts to the rest of the components in the Altiris products or the pcAnywhere Solution component that provides integration between pcAnywhere and the Symantec Management Console. Customers should validate the remote control tools currently in use.

There are also secondary risks associated with this situation. If the malicious user obtains the cryptographic key they have the capability to launch unauthorized remote control sessions. This in turn allows them access to systems and sensitive data. If the cryptographic key itself is using Active Directory credentials, it is also possible for them to perpetrate other malicious activities on the network.

Three months after making a promise to their users, Google has remained true to their word: Google+ will now allow psuedonyms.

Earlier today, Bradley Horowitz, Google+ Vice President of Product Management,posted the announcement to his account, which said they’re finally going to listen to the users who want to use nicknames and pseudonyms:

Over the next week, we’ll be adding support for alternate names – be they nicknames, maiden names, or names in another script – alongside your common name. This name will show up on your Google+ profile and in the hovercards which appear over your name. In the next few weeks, we’ll be displaying it more broadly as part of your name in other areas of Google+ as well. So if you’re Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Jane Doe (Smith), or Saurabh Sharma (सौरभ शर्मा), you can now communicate your identity the way you want to.

It’s hardly news that Tumblr is growing like a weed, but Founder and CEO David Karp reportedly announced at the DLD conference today that the service is now seeing over 100 million uniques a month and over 15 billion pageviews per month.

Pretty impressive. In September, it was at 12.5 billion pageviews per month, according to Quantcast data. Back then, Pingdom put out some other stats: 434 posts per second, 26,000 posts per minute, 1.56 million posts per hour, 263 million posts per week, 1.1 billion posts per month, 13.7 billion posts per year.

It’s probably safe to assume that these have gone up as well.

Tumblr’s newly released numbers highlight the significance of some other stats the company shared on Friday, regarding SOPA protests.

When AdSense goes down, publishers lose money. Google doesn’t really talk about the money part so much.

AdSense had some issues on Friday, where ads were not loading. People took to Google’s AdSense Help Forum to complain. One thread began with a post:

There have been many threads in the forum by publishers, who are seeing blank spaces where AdSense ads should be. The accounts are in good standing, and there has been no communication from Google regarding the account or discontinuation of ad serving to specific sites.

At least the no communication part eventually changed. Google employee “AdSensePro Chris” eventually chimed in:

Thanks for posting about this here. I’m working to get you more info on what happened, but in looking at many sites it does appear that ad serving has been restored.

I’ll try to post here as soon as possible, as well as updating the Known Issues page.

Thanks for your patience.

Pamela Parker, writing for MarketingLand, shared the following statement from Google:

“There is currently an issue with AdSense for Content ads not showing on a small number of publishers’ sites. Our engineers are working to investigate and resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”

The issue is still on the “known issues” page in Google’s AdSense help center. It says:

Details: We are aware that AdSense ads were not displaying on some partners’ sites early this morning (Pacific time). The issue has been resolved for many partners, and we will continue to provide updates here as soon as we can.

Another known issue listed is: Ads not displaying on HP TouchPads or in Kindle Fire’s Silk browser. For that one, Google says:

Details: We are aware that AdSense ads are not currently displaying on the HP TouchPad or Kindle Fire’s Silk browser. Our engineers are aware of the issue and are working on a solution.

As Barry Schwartz points out, some publishers are complaining about losing income from ads not being shown. Google hasn’t really addressed this.

Market capitalization is a term which speaks to the total value (dollar amount) of the tradable (number available) shares of a publicly traded company. Apple has experienced market caps as large as $400 billion. Right now that is bigger than the gross domestic products (market value of all finished goods and services produced within a country in a given period) of Austria, Greece, Argentina, and South America. Still Apple continues to grow.

Currently Apple is considered the eighth most valuable brand in the World. With the recent passing of founder Steve Jobs, some wonder if the Apple Enterprise will continue to grow. A brief look at what’s is happening in current events suggests the fear of losing momentum has no basis.

The recent publication of the Siri patent alone reveals some interesting opportunities for growth. A particular item listed on the patent, I’m sure, has many Apple enthusiast excited, is Apple Television. Who wouldn’t want a TV that asks you what you want to watch? I know I do and it would definitely be the first of its kind.

Also, current research indicates that iPad, and tablets in general, are growing in consumer popularity (everyone wants one of these things). Not surprising, iPad 3 is on its way sometime this March.

Beside product development and growth in current markets, Apple’s popularity has exploded into the Asian marketplace. So we can expect more growth for the company there.

There is no reason to believe Apple won’t continue to expand and grow despite the loss of Steve Jobs. The technology that was developed under his leadership appears to have boundless directions for development and integration. This thing isn’t slowing down anytime soon!